Last week, British Columbia received federal approval to decriminalize the possession of 2.5 grams or less of a handful of so-called hard drugs, including methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl. The policy change will go into effect at the end of January 2023 — years after the province applied to Health Canada for the exemption. The application was driven by British Columbia (BC)’s extraordinary drug poisoning crisis, which has claimed thousands of lives and has been on the rise in recent years — a crisis that persists throughout the entire country. The exemption also follows a growing, evidence-based consensus that current mitigation policies — policing and the criminal justice system — are ineffective. This may be too generous a reading. Thus far, drug control measures have actually been counterproductive in addressing drug use.

The policy shift was met with mixed reviews. There’s no need to review the opposition from the “war on drugs” advocates. That species of hopeless and superannuated thinking hearkens back to a deadly, anti-science, failed policy — criminalizing people who use drugs doesn’t work, full stop. War on drugs folks are ideologues hung up on Reagan-era sloganeering. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re the sort who’ll typically support alcohol and tobacco consumption — despite their well-documented deadly effects — while condemning those who use different sorts of drugs. To hell with them. What we ought to pay attention to is the response from community advocates.

Garth Mullins is an advisor to BC on drug policy and a drug user advocate. A self-described “old school dope fiend,” Mullins has reviewed the decriminalization announcement and is not pumping his fist to the sky. He’s been working on this issue since the late 1990s and says the 2.5-gram limit is insufficient — better geared to 1998 than 2022. That’s because the drugs on offer have changed; today, users require, and thus carry, more. It should be up to drug users to decide on the threshold, he says. They know best. Instead, it sounds like police decided.